Search Marketing Sage

It’s one thing to make sure your SEO efforts work in sync with your overall marketing plan. Try to integrate it with your traditional PR efforts (which, unfortunately, is silo’ed at many organizations), and chaos could ensue.

For this reason, it’s vital that both teams communicate with each other to avoid future problems arising. Otherwise, before you know it, the SEO team is asking for a link in an article that the PR team has just been in contact with regarding the latest press release. Not only does this add unnecessary extra work, but it also makes everyone look bad and creates an even larger chasm between SEO and PR. Here are some tips to avoid this toxic combustion.

So you have something you want to promote…you want to create awareness, build inbound links for SEO, and ultimately, generate leads and/or sales. One of the most overlooked news sources today are blogs. Not only can bloggers provide you with links, but they can also spread the word about your news or product to their readers. Bloggers are big.

How can you get bloggers to love you and want to post about your news or product? It’s definitely important to note that any relationship takes time and effort. Bring the romance to your bloggers with a little patience and extra work. Just like when you have a crush on someone, it’s best to act cool and not too pushy. Follow these same rules with your outreach campaign.

Matt Cutts, Head of Google’s Webspam team, announced Google’s Disavow Links Tool at PubCon in mid-October (Check out Janet’s post Live From PubCon: State of the Index with Matt Cutts about the announcment). If you have never engaged in artificial link schemes, this tool is not for you. At Search Mojo we have never participated in any spammy backlink schemes for ourselves or clients, but at an agency you may work with clients who before your engagement had employees or worked with an agency that acquired artificial links, even unbeknownst to them. If you encounter this situation, the Disavow Links Tool may be used to remove unnatural links pointing to your site. Just remember to proceed with caution when using this tool.

SEO is dead. How many times have you heard this lately? Probably more times than you care to think about; but guess what? The truth is, SEO as we know it is dead. Long live content marketing!

With Google’s Panda and Penguin updates, web-spam got a jab to the face and left hook to the jaw in an effort to improve the quality of search results. SEO is no longer about spinning an article out to as many content farms as possible, or getting as many links as you can afford to buy, or overstuffing your content with keywords. The focus is on producing engaging, informative content. Quality, not quantity.

With blogger outreach becoming more popular for SEO, it’s vital to know how to reach out to others and build online relationships. This panel featured Jabez LeBret, Melyssa St. Michael and Kelsey Libert.

Jabez LeBret

Jabez LeBret was up first and discussed getting links from the media. When pitching the media, try:

• relpying to a news query
• pitching a journalist
• pitching a publication

Check out HARO – Help a Reporter Out. Great stuff. Shows you inquiries from reporters searching for subject matter experts. But don’t cheat! They will blacklist you. They have a digest three times a day and specialized lists.

If you’re pitching a journalist:

• find them on LinkedIn
• do they write about your topic?
• send summary
• be relevant to their audience